ON
WEDNESDAY, August 13, 1947, one week after the timely death of his wife of six
weeks, Humbert Humbert, age 37, heir to
a small perfume company in New York and a literary scholar of sorts, takes
the Melmoth of his deceased wife, leaves Ramsdale, New England, drives 40
miles to Parkington, buys a trunk full of fancy girls' clothing, spends the night
in the car, drives 100 miles to pick up his stepdaughter Lolita
(aka Dolly or Lo), age 12, who
is spending the summer at a girls' camp, drives about 160 miles to a swank hotel
in Briceland, Connecticut where he spends the first night with her − and
next morning they embark on a one year automobile tour all over the United
States, in a meandering clockwise direction. In August, 1948, they finally
are almost back, arriving in Beardsley, Appalachia where they sort of settle
down and Lolita again attends school. Their settled life
does not work out, and nine months later, on May 29, 1949
they leave Beardsley for a second trip. This one is not ad hoc. It has been carefully planned by Lolita
and somebody else of whom Humbert does not know.
Their destination is the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains.
Irritatingly, from Illinois onward someone is pursuing them, using different
cars at every stage. On the Fourth of July, 1949, in a little Rocky Mountain
town by the name of Elphinstone, Lolita all of a sudden disappears.

The
moment H.H. and Lolita leave Briceland on August 15, Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita turns into a road novel. Actually, the particulars of Trip
One occupy
just 20 out of 306 pages and those of the Trip Two only 28. But as was the
case with Konstantin Godunov's Central Asian travels in The Gift
(1934-38), Nabokov manages to convey the impression of an intense, colorful,
dizzying albeit redundant and spooky voyage through unknown territory
perceived as for the very first time. He achieves this not so much by
reflecting on the generalities of travel but by heaping observation upon
observation at lightning speed,
by paying attention to minute details the dealers in grand ideas would deem
irrelevant, alternating between close-ups and panorama views. Before the reader has a
chance to have a closer look at a locality and to find an answer to his most
immediate questions
("Now what's that?
How in all the world did it
get there?"), he is whisked away to the next bewildering stop.

What
propels H.H.? He has little interest in any of the sights of the United
States, nor is he eager to show Lolita
her native country. As a matter of fact, he does
not know the lands
they are touring and does not care to know them.
His is the attitude of a blasé European
traveler at the same time bored and surprised, impressed and disgusted,
frightened and amused. Most man-made things
he tends to view with a slight sneer of derision; the landscapes they
traverse on the other hand again and again prompt his respect or awe. His sole motive during this year of travel is to
keep Lolita near him. As they cannot stay anywhere without being exposed, he
must remain on the move until he decides that idleness is
demoralizing Lolita and that this
nomadic life cannot go on indefinitely. He keeps Lolita with him mainly by
threatening to put her in some austere orphanage if she should attempt to
quit him; later, he buys her favors and occasionally uses force. To cheer
her up, he all the time has to keep proposing new places they could go and
visit. "Every morning during our yearlong travels I had to devise some
expectation, some special point in space and time for her to look forward
to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a shaping and
sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged and collapsed. The object
in view might be anything ..." (p.154). As he explains, they traveled
leisurely, eighty miles a day
with a day or two of rest in between. In these pauses, he will have wrecked
his brain and plowed through his guide books to discover a
promising
place that could serve as their next destination. "The
object in view might be ... anything whatsoever−but it had to be there, in
front of us, like a fixed star, although as likely as not Lo would feign
gagging as soon as we got to it"
(p.151-2).The novel
owes its
enormous
success also to the fact that readers were able to discover in it an
all too
real roadside America of highways, gas stations, motorists, motor courts (as motels were called) and diners,
one perhaps never described before in such a vivid way.

No speculation at all is
necessary to determine their overall itinerary. It is obvious. H.H. himself outlines it
(p.154). From New
England, they travel south, then meander back and forth between the
southeast and the Appalachian states, Arkansas and Kansas, from the
southeast follow a western route through Mississippi, Louisiana and on to
Texas, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona where they spend the winter, then
continue to southern California, follow the Pacific coast to Oregon and turn
east, crossing Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas and Nebraska and ending
up in the Midwest, avoiding Lolita's hometown. From here they proceed to the
little university town in the East where H.H. wants to try out a sedentary
life with Lolita.
Nabokov does not seem much concerned about working out the geography
of his road novel all too clearly, and in fact he could not, writing out of
the mind of a man who, after for a year traveling the length and breadth of a country without plan and purpose
other than to entertain a young prisoner whose interests he ignores, is bound to misremember and confuse a
lot. But while Humbert may not care where exactly he had been, every
reader who is wont to take his own bearings cannot help trying to figure out
where the twosome is.

Humbert's choice of
destinations underlines his awkwardness. He seems not to
have the slightest idea what a 12 year old girl might find interesting. Once in a while he tries to be the European father by taking her to a museum
or some other
institution of highbrow culture which she probably finds just boring. The
rest is pell-mell
−
caves, rodeos, ceremonials, beaches, battlefields,
memorials, homes, prisons, sanitariums, fish hatcheries, churches, caves again. It
shows the utter lack of rapport between the
two. Granted that many people might find it difficult to satisfy the tastes of
a girl like Lo, Humbert does not even try. He is not in the position to
try.

Their
exact itinerary can be inferred much more exactly
from the details he casually mentions. There are 58
specific places localized at least by state, and a few dozen
more about which little
more can be said than "somewhere en route."22 of those
58 are
openly and fully identified in the novel, some of them down to the very
street corner. That leaves 36+ places where some substantial information is
missing. It is these that remain to
be determined through geographical research and combinatorial conjecture.

If one
draws the shortest line through those 58 places, one ends up at a distance
of about 13,000 miles altogether. H.H., however, makes it clear that they
did not travel along any straight lines but zigzagged a lot. In the end, he says,
they had covered 27,000 miles. So they traveled twice as much as would have
been necessary to visit all the places mentioned in one well-planned grand
tour.

Nearly
all of these 58+ places are mentioned in three passages that have the form
of lists. The longest and most important of these is one of places visited
(pp.155-8). It suggests a temporal sequence, though it does not appear to be
quite reliable in this respect−H.H.'s memory may be wrong, or he may
want to mislead, and
anyway the list does not say how much meandering occurred
between any two of those places. The second list is one of places where they
had major quarrels (pp.158-9). The third one (pp.151-2) is a short list illustrating the
arbitrariness of their destinations. (On the map and the Trip One page,
only the places of the first list are numbered.) That is, the whole of Trip
One is
outlined on merely four pages.

No
guesswork either is needed to determine what guide books H.H. used. No less than thirteen
times he admits to the use
of travel guides, and only once he says "guide" while twelve times he
explicitly speaks of "tour books."Tour Book is a registered trademark of
the American Automobile Association (AAA). No other travel guides can have
been called Tour Books. Once H.H. explicitly speaks of the "Tour Book of the
Automobile Association" (p.145), and once he says that "I did not keep any
notes, and have at my disposal only an atrociously crippled tour book in
three volumes, almost a symbol of my torn and tattered past, in which to
check these recollections" (p.154). This side remark makes it possible to
determine which AAA Tour Books H.H. had at hand while writing. The AAA began
to publish its Tour Books in 1926, updating them every few years until 1942.
After World War II, refreshed versions began to appear again in 1947. Until
the 1960s, there were just three paperback volumes: (1) Northeastern Tour
Book, (2) Southeastern Tour Book, (3) Western Tour Book.
Only from the '60s, they began to proliferate. H.H. will have used the most
up-to-date versions available at the time, i.e. the 1947 edition. The purely
sightseeing parts of these three volumes (without lodging information, restaurant
recommendations and ads) were assembled in one hardcover volume edited by
AAA travel director Elmer Jenkins (Guide to America, Washington DC:
Public Affairs Press, 1947). So these are what H.H. will have used, and
Nabokov too. Here
he
checked opening hours and admission charges, and several items (e.g. at Blue
Licks Battlefield
and at Lincoln's Springfield home)
he quoted almost verbatim. However, two of the quaint quotes from the travel
literature (Magnolia Gardens, Reno) do not seem to be
from any
AAA Tour Book. As they are unlikely to be invented, the sources remain unknown.

There
are fifteen
imaginary towns in the novel: Ramsdale, Parkington, Climax, Briceland, Lepingville,
Pisky, Kasbeam, Soda, Wace, Snow, Champion, Elphinstone, Cantrip, Coalmont,
Gray Star. Trip One begins in
four New England towns which are thus disguised and then proceeds to real
places on the real map, while on Trip Two all places are camouflaged. But "camouflaged"
or "disguised" are the wrong words. These places are truly imaginary
ones, meaning that they are described so briefly or so unspecifically that
they preclude their identification with any real place. There are
hundreds or thousand of towns like Ramsdale in all of New England.
In spite of their purely imaginary status, however, they are not out of this
world. Roads from real places lead to them and emanate from them.
If you pick up all the clues and do some combinations, you can make a try at
their approximate localization. For four of the imaginary towns
at least the state is given explicitly or implicitly: Briceland (Connecticut), Snow and Champion (Colorado), Gray Star (Alaska).The others cannot be
pinpointed
but
their whereabouts can be inferred
with more or less certainty. To this purpose, the
distances mentioned in the course of the novel are helpful: Ramsdale –
Parkington 40 mi, Parkington – Camp Q 100 mi (2˝ hours of driving on winding
roads = 40 mph); Camp Q (near Climax) – Briceland, Connecticut 4 hours of driving (i.
e. c. 160 mi);
Ramsdale – Beardsley 400mi; Pisky – Cincinnati <300 mi; Kasbeam 30 mi N of Pisky;
Elphinstone – next big city 30 or 60 mi; Elphinstone – Kasbeam 1000 mi; Grimm Road
12 mi N of Parkington; New York City – Cantrip 400 mi; Coalmont – New York
City 800 mi; Coalmont – Ramsdale 14-20 hours of nonstop driving.

Without knowing
Nabokov's exact itineraries on his travels to the West, it is hard to say of
which real places inhis novel he had a firsthand knowledge. My impression (which I would have a hard time defending) is that most of the
places in the East and the West he had visited himself on one of his trips
while for some of the places in the South and in the Central States he
may have relied on the Tour Books of the Triple-A. All the
glowing things he says about American landscapes, all the observations on
motels, roadside restaurants and traffic in general are certainly based on his
own experience.

Of the
36+ specific places visited by H.H. and Lolita, 25 were identified in my
notes appended to the German edition that opened the
Rowohlt series of Nabokov’s collected works in 1989, four of them
misleadingly or
downright incorrectly. In the revised
editions of 1995 (Winkler Verlag) and 1996 (Rowohlt Verlag), when I had
invaluable help from Jeff Edmunds, the
manager of
Zembla, I
brought the count of identified places up to 31 of which 6 were not quite
correct. The tip that the first cave visited may not have been Mammoth but the
Gap Cave I have from Marianne Cotugno, and further inquiry has shown it was
right.

In the meantime, after decrypting
Nabokov’s Berlin and
Godunov’s expedition to Central Asia, I have become more expert in the
solving of geographical and topographical puzzles, and the Internet has
vastly increased the scope of research possible even for somebody outside
the USA. So only oneof the 36+ items remains uncertain to date: the Rogers collection of art expected to be somewhere in
Southern California
(though there is a suitable candidate in Mississippi). Any
suggestions will be welcome. Consulting the Tour Books from which H.H. and Nabokov drew
has
made it possible to newly identify several
localities, to confirm some old
suspicions and to add relief to Humbert's travelogue. My 1989-96 notes
will be corrected, expanded and updated in the paperback edition
that Rowohlt is currently preparing
for late in 2007. These Lolita,USA webpages are a
spin-off for the benefit of the English speaking reader. In addition they
can show what the book cannot, maps and pictures of the places. The maps are
based on a digital prototype map provided by
www.demis.nl/. Many
images
are
"vintage"
picture post cards from my collection, as close to c.1950 as they could be obtained;
the others are mostly photos of my own, made on various journeys between
1978 and 2007. Vladislav Sobolev drew
my attention to several errors or inconsistencies in the chronology of
Humbert's travels which have been corrected. The page numbers refer to the American paperback edition of
Lolita by Vintage Books (New York: 1989 ff.).

In
recent years, critics have tended to laud Nabokov as a metaphysical
seeker, a composer of arcane riddles, a postmodern juggler of erudite
associations. However true that may be, the "realistic" side to his art
deserves not be overlooked. He himself did not like the words "reality"
and "realistic" and
thought they should better be put in quotation marks, yet could not quite do
without them. Perhaps that has dissuaded critics from noticing how much "average reality" he had to assemble in order to make his invented miniature worlds credible,
how much robust reality he had to study to make his choices of telling detail. His geography is a case in point.
For a change, it may pay to look for his "sources" not in remote
literature but in the real world. Whenever one encounters
some weird place in his fiction it is safer to assume it has some basis in
reality than to take it as a fact that everything
is
imaginary. In those of his novels and stories he himself called "realistic-pychological,"
that is in all except Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister
and three of his four last novels, just about all of the seemingly imaginary places
have some counterpart on the map. You bet they do.